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Yemen chronicle: an anthropology of war and mediation – By Steven

Caton

Article in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute · March 2008

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00485_8.x

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historical literature, participant observation,
interviews, focus groups, and discourse analysis,
this book captures the various meeting-points
and complex articulations existing between
‘groupist’ nationalist discourses and institutions
present in the public sphere and everyday
pragmatic individual choices.
The Transylvanian town of Cluj, which is the
locus and not the focus of this research, has
been through several changes of hands between
Hungary and Romania during the last 150 years,
and its inhabitants, Hungarian and Romanian,
were alternatively subjected to the nationalizing
policies of these two countries during this
period. The consequences of these alternative
loyalties for the understanding of their own
ethnicity and of ethnic differences by Romanians
and Hungarians are not nowadays symmetrical,
owing to the demographic balance (81.3 per
cent Romanians and 18.7 per cent Hungarians;
cf. 2002 census) and to the Hungarians’ status
of ‘national minority’. In the Cluj public sphere,
being Hungarian is a marked category, while
being Romanian is unmarked. However, the
existence of numerous Hungarian institutions,
especially schools, associations, press, and also
an ethnically based political party, the
Democratic Alliance of Hungarians of Romania,
ensures that there is a Hungarian sphere in the
city where being Hungarian becomes unmarked.
This Hungarian sphere, which would have the
institutional means for reproducing itself
perpetually, is not threatened primarily by the
nationalizing policies of the Romanian state, but
by the individual choices of ethnic Hungarians,
notably by their intermarriages with Romanians
and the necessity for integration within the
Romanian labour market. The anti-groupist
position of the authors of this book, which
allows them to see ethnicity as a category, not as
a group, encourages them to explore the thick
description of some individual life trajectories,
the various options and choices of ethnic
Hungarians to adhere, in spirit, or not, to the
Romanian citizenship they hold, a status often
questioned by their political representatives. The
indirect strategy used by the authors in the field
is asking not about ethnicity, but about
everything else concerning the lives of their
respondents, which allows them to ponder the
importance of ethnic identification in everyday
life and generates a fresh view on Hungarian-
Romanian daily relations commonly
considered to be simply and ‘naturally’
conflicting.
This book is remarkable because of the
comprehensive methodology of data collection
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 201-235
Book reviews 209
on which it is based and the richness of the data
collected. It seems to mix several field
approaches in a rather commonsensical, rather
than in a theoretically integrated, way, but it
could be perceived as generating a new
theoretical model. Its efficient and engaging
account of the complex Hungarian-Romanian
relations in Transylvania supports the soundness
of this model. We can only rejoice that through
the writing of this book Rogers Brubaker reads
anew the theories of nationalism to which he
has contributed in the past with the aid of
convincing field arguments.
Monica Heintz University of Paris X-Nanterre
Caton, Steven. Yemen chronicle: an
anthropology of war and mediation. 341 pp.,
maps. New York: Hill & Wang, 2005. $26.00
(cloth)
This book, in the words of its author, is an
‘ethno-memoir’, which is a combination of diary
entries, field notes, fragments of memory, and
autobiographical recollections as a means of
authorial self-construction. These are woven into
an ethnographic account of a tribal conflict in a
Yemeni village, in which poetry features as the
principal means of conflict mediation. The
author evokes Malinowski’s Dairy as the
precursor to his ethno-memoir, which
incorporates two types of narrative – diary and
field notes – as a means of straddling the private
and public facets of ethnographic writing. As he
explains, ‘In writing this ethno-memoir I have
wanted to bring these two narratives in closer
proximity to each other, hoping they will interact
and produce something other and greater than
either or both of them alone’ (p. 135).
The end result is two-fold. Firstly, it is a
confessional tale that recounts his experiences as
fieldworker in Yemen between 1979 and 1981,
which led to the ethnography Peaks of Yemen I
summoned, published in 1990, and
complemented by an account of a revisit twenty
years later in 2001 to put the finishing touches to
the present book. However, the resemblances
with Malinowski’s journal entries are few, such
as the cryptic confession of sexual attraction to
an informant (p. 161), and the intimation about
his despondency over a dead-end relationship to
‘X’ (p. 154). Here, the contrasts dominate: there
is no vituperation against the natives. Indeed, in
contrast to Malinowski’s immaculately white
Western attire (see book cover of his Diary) as a
symbol of his virulent denial of cultural
commonality with his native hosts, Caton
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2008
 210 Book reviews
seemed obsessed with what he called ‘cultural
impersonations’ in the form of sartorial solidarity
with his Yemeni hosts. He insisted on wearing
the various garments and accessories of
tribesmen, as a kind of vestmental déguisement
in pursuit of a rapport that never materialized. In
effect, this earned him the contempt of the
contingent of foreign Arab teachers in the village
school who dressed in Western garb, while the
approbation of a few Yemeni friends did not
allay the suspicion of some of his local hosts as
to his being an American spy, which ultimately
landed him in a Yemeni jail.
Secondly, and more importantly, this
ethno-memoir offers an holistic ethnographic
contextualization of the communal functions of
tribal poetry. The previous book was a rather
technical recension on the structural properties
with merely illustrative ethnographic
exemplifications of the socio-political functions
of tribal poetic genres, while this book is a
narrative excursion into a communal conflict
engendered by the event that provides the
book’s storyline, namely the elopement of two
tribal girls with, or their abduction by, a sada
boy. This event led to a protracted inter-tribal
mediation process that enabled the author to
describe the socio-cultural embeddedness of the
composition and performance of poetry as an
integral part of tribal conflict mediation. In
shifting the emphasis from poetic performance
as a means to constructing the individual
identity of the ideal tribesman in his previous
ethnography, to that of poetry as an
indispensable tool of conflict mediation in this
book, the author seems to perform an apt
interpretative revision, given that the latter
interpretation has more resonance with the local
conception of poetry as a means of commenting
on, and proposing a solution to, inter-tribal
conflicts and national political problems – in
addition to its entertainment function within
major rituals in tribal communities. In this light,
James Clifford’s observation that Malinowski’s
Diary and his Argonauts constitute a ‘single
expanded text’ seems apropos to Caton’s case.
In sum, the text offers an interesting strategy
on how to recycle surplus fieldwork material that
could not fit into a thematically exclusive
dissertation, or how to transcend the
private/public dichotomy constraining the
protocols of published ethnography. The least
satisfactory aspect of the book is the absence of
analytical substance to justify the sub-title ‘An
anthropology of war and mediation’ as well as
that of fulfilling the author’s hope that the book
would inspire a different form of engagement –
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 201-235
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2008
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ethnographic and political – between the US
and the Middle East in the post 9/11 era, which
are the presumed purposes of the epilogue. The
author’s few insights about the perennial
‘problem of violence in tribal Arab society’ do
not go beyond affirming his tribal interlocutors’
own explanations: namely the seemingly
premeditated ineffectiveness of modern Yemeni
institutions of government. These, he argues, are
merely formal structures underpinning the
performance of the symbolic rituals of rule on
behalf of an unjust state that thrives on the
competitive nature of tribes, and the strategic
recourse either to benign neglect or to active
fomentation of tribal factional feuding in the
hope of encouraging their self-destruction, or at
least of containing their political power within
regional fiefdoms. As such, Caton’s
ethno-memoir does not have ‘lessons to impart’
regarding the mending of fences between the
West and the Middle East, but seems merely to
recommend philanthropic gestures from foreign
fieldworker toward local informants as a means
of palliating the intrinsic asymmetry of
ethnographic research because of the unequal
exchange between ethnographers and research
subjects.
Serge D. Elie CEFAS, University of Sussex
De Neve, Geert & Henrike Donner (eds).
The meaning of the local: politics of place in
urban India. xi, 238 pp., maps, tables, figs,
illus., bibliogrs. London, New York:
Routledge, 2006. £75.00 (cloth)
This volume contains ten essays, including an
editorial introduction. It describes the
multi-faceted connections between urban
localities and the processes of globalization. By
focusing on social, spatial, and historical
associations between peoples and places,
contributors to the volume examine the
meaning of locality in a variety of empirical
urban contexts, including both metropolitan and
small towns in India. They explore the ways in
which social and political relations are spatially
and historically contingent. Through detailed
ethnographies they demonstrate how urban
space is increasingly interconnected while local
boundaries and group-based identities are
reconstructed and often consolidated through
the use of traditional idioms and localized
practices.
In methodological terms, the volume
privileges neighbourhoods as a window through
which to study politics, culture, and change in